Commoners and commoning in neoliberal times: A critical realist study of English community-led housing

Community-led housing (CLH) is a promising model for socially and environmentally sustainable living. It is also a very small fraction of the housing sector in the UK. Could CLH be part of the solution to UK’s housing crisis and benefit more people? Focusing on the social aspects and taking a critical realist approach, this research looked for mechanisms that make CLH work, and identified who it worked for, under what circumstances - and why. Using mixed-methods, it contributes qualitative insights on housing cooperatives and cohousing communities, thereby filling a gap in qualitative work on UK housing cooperatives. The quantitative work provided new data on the social profile of cohousing in England.
The main findings and arguments are set out in three papers, engaging with three research questions: what are the visions and aims of CLH; what kind of social relations form in CLH; what kinds of identities and subjectivities develop in CLH. The paper: “’A place that is different from the usual capitalist world’: The potential of community-led housing as safe and just spaces” (chapter 3), deploys Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice to argue that the social relations in CLH can create safe and just spaces by responding to socio-economic, cultural-symbolic and political injustice. The paper, “Contested subjectivities in a UK housing cooperative: Old hippies and Thatcher’s children negotiating the commons” (chapter 4), shows how neoliberalisation affected members’ subjectivities and visions over time. The paper, “Beyond affordability: English cohousing as White middle class spaces” (chapter 5), applies a Bourdieusian analysis to show that the main barrier to diversity in UK cohousing is cultural rather than purely economic, since its core practices and values reproduce classed (and racialised) distinctions.
Overall, my contribution is both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, I develop the concepts of safe space (in the context of justice and neoliberal oppression), the cooperative subject and the two-way relation between habitus and class perception. I introduce the concept of minimalist and maximalist visions of the commons, which affect the practice of commoning, and propose a framework to consider the impact of visions, social practices and subjectivities on commoning. Practically, I point at the benefits of CLH for its members; the practical ways commons can challenge neoliberalisation; and the way exclusionary practices operate in the cohousing sector and beyond.